The eleventh edition of Dispatches, a new sporadical email newsletter about the arts of the past as they live in the present day by Elizabeth Pochoda, Advisory Editor, The Magazine ANTIQUES.
The bouillabaisse of design influences on an early American silver soup tureen
A few years ago, one of two silver soup tureens ordered by Thomas Gibbons in 1810 came on the market, after remaining for nearly two centuries in the possession of his descendants.
Setting the stage
The refurbishment of an 1855 theater and arts center is the latest milestone in the renaissance of Hudson, New York.
And that’s the way it isn’t
Anxiety about fake news has also been greeted with bemusement by historians, who note that the phenomenon is hardly new.
Whose history is it?
The National Museum of African
American History and Culture reshapes our nation’s story one artifact at a time
Superfluity & Excess: Quaker Philadelphia falls for classical splendor
The fruits of extensive research on Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s 1808 house and furniture for William and Mary Waln begin with their impact on the aesthetic of the city itself
Cajun and Creole, the rough and the fine
Over the past ten years Wade Lege has rescued some of the disappearing landmarks of his native Louisiana
Andy Warhol’s Pittsburgh
Collecting and researching American art have been avocations of mine since my student days at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1950s, when I commuted to school through the neighborhoods of the Hill District and past the belching steel mills on both sides of the Monongahela River. Those are fond memories still—fifty years after leaving Pittsburgh for New England—so when …
Invisible Artistry: The restoration of a late seventeenth-century London town house
Fig. 1. Outside the rear elevation of this c. 1670 house in North London are a wrought iron strapwork garden seat, c. 1820, and a pair of seventeenth-century carved stone gatepost finials. Photography by Debbie Patterson When a client asked the London antiques dealer Robert Young to visit his newly acquired house he could not have known that this visit …
A tale of two sofas
They were big, brawny, and bold. The near-identical sofas in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA)-once celebrated as rare examples of gilded furniture from the shop of John Henry Belter-were so visually pushy that the former curator of American arts, David Park Curry, dubbed them the “Tarleton Twins.” Today, following several years of research and an extensive conservation campaign, …